I had always thought that someday Bo would have my job. I’d assumed it would be a peaceful transition, he—brilliant, capable, my chosen successor. It hit me then that the decision would likely be taken out of my hands. I doubted this epic calamity would result in another round of leave; if Miles did anything, he would fire me.
When the car arrived, everyone stepped in but me. “In your opening remarks during the hearing,” I said as the doors began to close. I raised my voice, “You can still press her on the temperament issue! Can emphasize her hypocrisy!”
But Miles, conferring with L.K. and Bo, did not so much as glance in my direction.
Thirty
I’d made it through the week without being fired. Barely. In the hours and first days after meeting with Melinda Darley, Miles was monosyllabic when he spoke to me at all. He continued to send me to the worst assignments, pointless meetings, random panels. He, or maybe Bo, had told L.K. about what happened, and as truly sympathetic people are wont to be, she absorbed this upsetting news by becoming upset herself. So unfair, Daisy, she’d said. Another piece of terrible gossip leveled against you. She’d promised not to repeat it. It didn’t serve Miles for this to spread anyway.
Though L.K. thought I was being treated badly, it was actually the reverse, and then some. I’d put Miles in jeopardy with my brilliant little plan, so desperate to get my job back, I’d wounded the person and the causes I most wanted to support.
When it felt safe, after the worst of Miles’s anger had dimmed, I had remorsefully, tentatively brought to him my idea for Literacy Week. It was met with a grunt of approval, and a gradual easing of tensions around the office. Still, my nerves made me feel like I’d never sleep again. Midnight on Saturday found me in my tattered terry bathrobe, one I’d had since college and couldn’t bring myself to throw away, watching cable news. Even at this late hour, anchors and pundits were chewing over Melinda’s upcoming confirmation hearings; a contentious nominee had practically everyone on air salivating.
The fact that Melinda Darley, of all people, was aware my father had stolen for me was especially brutal. Had she known when we ran into her at the graveyard presser? Had others? While I trusted L.K., Bo, and Miles, I didn’t have the same confidence that Melinda Darley’s office would remain close-lipped. Putting my faith in her and her staff would be like trusting a stool with two legs to hold my weight.
But as much as I resented Melinda Darley, she’d brought something into stark relief: even though she’d never admit it, she and my father were remarkably similar. They both threw money at problems, flouted decency and sometimes laws, all the while thinking they were helping their children, and by extension themselves, burnishing their reputations. At least, that must’ve been Gregory’s motivation.
When Bo had asked me for the truth, all I’d said was I don’t know. What I meant was, I don’t know what to say. If I came clean about what my father had done, I would dislocate the lives of my mother and sister further, lose my job, my credibility, everything I’d tried to rebuild in the wake of my father’s death.
But the question still nagged: How many more bad choices before I became entirely unrecognizable? I kept dead-ending there, and a trapdoor kept opening under my feet, causing me to fall back to the start.
My phone buzzed: Atlas.
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
“Of course not.” I pressed the phone into my ear, willing him closer.
“I figured you’d be watching the news,” he said, referring to Melinda. “Turn it off, please, would you?”
“Because I’m about to throw myself off the roof?”
“You’re not on the roof,” he said. “If you were, I would see you.”
“You’re outside?” I got up and shuffled to the window. It was dark, but I could make out his figure on the sidewalk below. He raised an arm and saluted. Unsure why he was outside my building after midnight, I waved back slowly. “What in the world are you doing?” I asked into the phone. Our positions made me think of Romeo, or Lloyd Dobler.
“Honesty time,” replied Atlas, and I thought I might’ve seen him sway on his feet. “I’m inebriated.”
I wondered if Ari was at his apartment, asleep perhaps, waiting for him to get home. I wondered why he was here, and not with her. But then he hiccupped, and said “Oh, excuse me” in such a cute, polite way, I put Ari aside and told him to come on up. “I have coffee,” I said, “or your favorite bourbon.”
We ended the call—his slurry Yay!—was the last thing I heard, and I buzzed him inside. Turning off the television, I evaluated my outfit. I was wearing soft clothes in large sizes, the bathrobe did nothing for my figure, and my hair was piled on top of my head. I considered whether I should change, put on makeup, but then opted to open my door and wait, just as I was. Even if there’d been time, what did I need to impress him for?
A minute later he rounded the stairs with a broad smile. “Daisy,” he sang when he hugged me, lifting me easily off my feet. Had he always been this strong, or was it the booze? “I was grabbing pints with mates from work right around the corner, and when I walked past your window and saw the light I just had to ring.”
He was drunk, all right, and it had thickened his accent. I silently gave thanks for my own soberness. God help me if I’d been tipsy like at the wedding. Then I could officially add homewrecker to my résumé.
He followed me inside; it took him two tries to get his jacket hooked onto my coat tree. When he succeeded, he looked at me proudly, and I gave him a little applause. I’d only seen him like this once, on the trail years ago. There was something delightful about witnessing a normally buttoned-up man loosen his collar.
“I have to tell you a story about what happened to me today,” he said, flopping on my couch. “It involves my apartment building email LISTSERV, an emotional support peacock, a broken elevator, and Vlad, my maintenance man, whose side hustle involves selling energy crystals and men’s jewelry.”
“Perfect.” I made the executive decision that water was the best choice for him, so I grabbed us two glasses from the kitchen and joined him on the couch. His hair was disheveled on top, his dress shirt, which seemed like it was once crisp, was untucked from his jeans.
He took the glass and chugged most of it in a few gulps. “But first,” he said when he surfaced, “tell me about your day. Where did you go, who did you see, what was everything about everything?”
I dropped my head back into the cushions and laughed. “What was everything?” I repeated.
“It’s a simple question.” His shoulders began to heave with laughter. “What is everything regarding everything?”
With his inebriation, as he’d called it, my week felt less devastatingly serious. “Help me with something,” I said, comforted by his presence, thinking I might as well bring up the subject that had been eating at me before he’d waltzed in. He was the only one in the world, at this point, with whom I felt secure enough to talk to about it. Not wanting to ruin the mood, I kept my voice casual. “How do you think Melinda Darley—soon to be Secretary Darley—found out about my father and the tuition money?”
“She knows?” He ran his hand over his end-of-day stubble. “Shit. Her camp must’ve gotten to Andrea Pell, too. That’s the way I found out. Your father, apparently, had said something to her, and I followed the clues to his office’s expenditure statements...”
“Andrea. His...lover,” I muttered, tripping over the last word. Here was yet another person in the world who knew, or at least suspected, that I was the reason for my father’s entrée into financial dishonesty. “What more,” I asked, “did she tell you? I’m just wondering what else Darley’s people know.”
Atlas finished his water; he appeared more sober now, his eyes less squiggly. He faced me, serious. “If it gives you any peace,” he said, “she did say that your father had every intention in the world of paying the money back. But—
”
“But he never did.”
“One bad decision becomes another, and then another.” He winced. “If Melinda Darley knows—”
“We have intel on her. And we’ve made an arrangement,” I interrupted. “Thanks to Ari, actually.” Her name seemed to have an effect on him. He blinked, shifted, breaking our eye contact. “Your turn,” I prompted, trying to reclaim the light mood of moments ago. “Tell me about Vlad?”
“Oh, yes,” he laughed, and reclined, settling in. And just like that we were back, just us, Ari’s name like the smoke from an extinguished flame. And for the next hour, I let his voice silence all others.
Thirty-One
In the back of a second-grade classroom, below a corkboard with posters of Harriet Tubman and Cal Ripken—both famous Marylanders, to be sure, yet one slightly more accomplished than the other—Bo and I had contorted ourselves on plastic chairs built for much smaller bodies. This was the final event we had planned for Literacy Week. Over the course of the seven days, we’d met with community organizers and teachers, school counselors and adult day-care workers, and I’d come away with a notebook full of appropriation ideas and tasks to complete. Yes, I found myself saying thankfully, gladly. We can help get your arts center a new HVAC system. Yes, absolutely the women and children’s shelter should have a library. Yes, Miles can certainly help you with a letter of recommendation for the Naval Academy. Here’s my email address. Here, take my card.
In the front of the room, the children sat crisscross-applesauce on the reading rug, with only minor interruptions shushed out from Miss Brown behind her teacher’s desk. As the students listened to Miles finish a story about a bunny who started a book club, Bo showed me headlines emailed from the press office. One of the programs we were promoting—1000 Books Before Kindergarten—was trending. And Miles’s reaction to meeting Charlie, the rescued pit bull who let children read to him at the Elliott City Library, had even gone viral. “Miles is a meme,” whispered Bo. We pounded fists, proud that Literacy Week seemed to have legs.
When Miles was done, the children applauded and Miss Brown asked if they had any questions for their senator.
Bo and I observed a young scholar rise to her knees, begging Miles to call on her. “If you weren’t you, who would you be?” the girl asked. Her school-mandated polo was royal purple and only partially tucked. Her sneakers were new and her pants just a bit short.
Miles said that he would be himself, an answer that was both perfectly him and perfectly appropriate for a classroom full of seven-year-olds. “What’s your name, and what do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked her.
“Well, sir,” she started, bouncing her bottom on her heels, sounding very much like she’d given this a lot of thought. “My name is Fiona. I want to be a doctor and a ballerina and a mommy and a senator.”
Bo and I shared a discreet laugh. Miles, though, slid from his chair to join the children on the rug, and nodded. “Those are noble professions,” he said. “I want to ask the children here, what do all those jobs have in common?”
“Money!” several yelled.
“Helping!” said others.
“Yes,” said Miles, calming the chatter that had bubbled up in the group. “But I mean what do you need to do those jobs?” The children were stumped. Miles looked to the back of the classroom, to Bo and me. “Maybe my chief of staff can answer my question. Daisy?”
The children, each one of them, along with Miss Brown, focused their attention on me. I tried not to fidget. Oh, this was the part of school I hated the most. The dreaded cold call. “Character?” I proposed.
“And education,” said Bo helpfully.
“Indeed,” said Miles, glad to finally hear the answer he was waiting for. “An education is important, not just because Miss Brown is teaching you all how to read and write well and do difficult math problems, but because an education teaches us how to be good people, strong people. Everyone, show me your muscles.” In a flash, the children flexed their tiny biceps. “Impressive.” He gave a few skinny arms around the circle a squeeze. “Now, strength is there, but it’s also here.” He pointed to his chest.
Fiona, who was fast becoming my favorite, raised her hand again. “Mama says if I want to be a doctor, I have to be smart in my brain and brave in my soul.”
“If you want to do any job well, Fiona, you have to be smart and brave.” Miss Brown tapped her knuckles on her desk, as though to say this is important.
“And nice, right, Miss Brown?” said a little boy with a gap in his front teeth. When she confirmed he was correct, the class erupted again, each volunteering the characteristics they believed important to success. Good painter was one. Funny was another.
“And telling the truth,” said Fiona, waving both hands in the air with an impish grin. “Can’t be a dirty liar!”
The children loved this one, falling over each other with giggles. Miles, charmed, chuckled too. But they all faded away to the background, and suddenly it was just me, alone, unable to join in. Because when Fiona had proclaimed that one should not be a dirty liar, the face that popped into my mind was not my father’s. It was my own.
“Language,” said Miss Brown, clapping her hands sharply. “Fiona, you try again.”
It took Fiona a few seconds, but she got there. “Honest,” she said. “A person has got to be honest.”
* * *
Miles set off for a short tour of the school’s library, and I, requiring space to think, wandered the building’s hallways. Memorial Day was a big thing to celebrate here, it seemed, as the main corridor was lined with stars and stripes, rendered in the familiar chunky, brutalist paint strokes of children. Several versions I actually liked, and made a mental note to inquire with the school if Miles could have one for his office. Maybe I would ask for one, as well, to remind myself what this was all for.
I pushed open a set of doors at the end of one hallway and walked out the school’s main entrance and into the humid weight of early summer, which had blazed in this last week of May and clapped over us like a lid. I thought I might sit in one of the benches nearby—one, a gift from the class of 2009 seemed clean enough—but down the stairs leading into the parking lot, I spotted the back of Bo’s head.
I descended a dozen stairs to where he was perched in a patch of shade and sat beside him. “Hi,” I said, feeling the heat of concrete through the thin fabric of my work pants regardless.
“I had to make for the exit,” Bo said, passing his phone from one hand to the other, his gaze focused into the distance beyond the school buses in the parking lot.
“Me, too,” I admitted. “Too many precocious children trying to teach me lessons.”
“Yeah?” Bo asked. “What are they teaching us jaded old cynics today?”
Not feeling equipped quite yet to answer his question, I posed one instead. “Why are you out here? You disappeared. I thought you were going to take up that teacher’s offer to see the coding studio. I thought you’d heed the call of the nerds.”
He laughed softly, then took a ragged breath as he stored his phone in his jacket pocket. “No, I—needed air. It’s something about this school. I swear I had a teacher exactly like Miss Brown. Just got me thinking about the past.”
My phone rang; Wallis’s name lit up the screen. “Blake Darley won his primary last night,” I said. It had been close, but winning is winning, whether it’s by one vote or one million. He’d be facing his opponent the third Tuesday of July. “I’m sure that’s why she’s calling.” But one look at Bo’s face had me silencing it. “I’ll get back to her later.”
“That fucking guy.” Bo dragged his hands down his cheeks. “He wasn’t nice to my sister and he wasn’t nice to Wallis. And once he wins, we are going to start seeing him at work. Perfect.” Off to our right, a smaller side door opened, and a class of squealing children streamed onto a big mulched playground fenced in by
chain-link. “I’m sorry. It’s been an odd day.”
“Tell me,” I said. A person prone to worry and melancholy such as I can usually spy another. “Because this isn’t about bunny’s book club or Blake Darley.”
We watched a group on the playground tussle over the single working swing. “My sister has decided to go for her PhD. My mother is thrilled. All of them are in Italy, you know. My parents and my sister and her fiancé. Some monastery outside Florence. There isn’t supposed to be Wi-Fi, but somehow the Judge got an email out to the whole family. She couldn’t be prouder of Jessica.” He said this last line with the grand sweep of an arm.
“And you’re still waiting for your affirmation?”
“Affirmation? Hell, I’m still waiting for her to say, ‘I love you, Robert.’”
“She loves you,” I assured him, recalling the way she had spoken about her son that night in the glow of her kitchen, the pain in her voice when she’d acknowledged their estrangement.
“I know that,” Bo conceded. “Just would be nice to hear it from time to time. I have this chronic fear that I’ll never make her proud.” He rubbed his knees and sighed. “What am I doing, Daisy? I passed up a vacation with my family to help Miles become a meme?”
I scratched the back of my damp neck. When Bo put it like that, it made me realize the frivolousness of our so-called accomplishment. Still, I couldn’t trivialize this event we’d worked so hard on. Because then where would that leave the list I’d made after Charleston? Where would that leave me? “We’re hopefully doing some good. We’re getting the message out, in whatever way people will receive it. Even if that is solely through GIFs.” When this didn’t seem to have an effect, I nudged him with an elbow. “You’re really going through something here. Is this crisis early midlife, or simply existential?”
He smiled, but it quickly slid off his face. “I just—do you ever think, what if I’m wasting my life? What if I accomplish a whole lot of nothing? The fear lives here”—he patted his heart—“and it is constant. I can’t get rid of it. How do we shake it, Daisy? Please tell me you know.”
Ladies of the House Page 23